A patrol-car camera system that automatically recognizes wanted or stolen vehicles’ license plates has been approved for Temple City Sheriff’s Station as part of a $335,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant for L.A. County Sheriff’s Department upgrades.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved the grant on Tuesday. The camera system will cost $35,000, while another $300,000 will go toward upgrading a gang database for the entire Sheriff’s department.

“It’s supplying the latest technology and information sharing to combat gangs on the street,” said Tony Bell, a spokesman for Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

The camera system can capture license plate images and automatically process them through a computer database to identify whether a wanted or stolen vehicle is within range.

The funding for the camera came as a result of discussions several years ago between officials at the Temple City station and at the office of Congressman Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, Sheriff’s Capt. Richard Shaw said.

“They asked us if there was anything that we could use to improve our ability to provide public safety services to the citizens in the Temple station area,” Shaw said. “I said that (the camera system) would be very useful to us here at Temple.”

The new camera would be the station’s third, and deploy mostly in Schiff’s congressional district, including Temple City and areas east of Pasadena and north of San Gabriel.

In addition, the cameras can be used to track certain vehicles of interest, Shaw said.

“As an example, let’s say we’re trying to track a person of interest in a particular crime,” Shaw said. “If (the license plate) has been read by one of these devices, it will tell you if this vehicle’s been seen in Long Beach or Pasadena or Corona … There may not be probable cause for an arrest, but it’s an investigative tool.”

The other $300,000 of the grant will go toward the department’s Gang CopLink project, a database of gang intelligence that shares information with 46 local police departments.

The Board of Supervisors also approved on Tuesday a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of Justice aimed at improving the speed of the Sheriff’s Department’s DNA analysis.

That money is meant to reduce by 1,100 cases the backlog of sexual assault cases waiting for DNA testing.

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